Jeff Vrabel: After a day at Chuck E. Cheese, anyone would need a drink

Monday

Feb 25, 2008 at 12:01 AMFeb 25, 2008 at 6:50 AM

Due mostly to the vengeful nature of karma, I spent the better part of the past weekend ensnared in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.

Jeff Vrabel

Due mostly to the vengeful nature of karma, I spent the better part of the past weekend ensnared in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.

It was part of the birthday celebration for a small and alarmingly adorable 2-year-old who, I am hoping, will one day have children of his own, so he can know precisely what it's like to spend part of your weekend ensnared in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant. Take it from Uncle Jeff, Junior: You'll pay. Oh, sweet mercy, one day you'll pay.

Two things: 1. Lest you think this is a rant against parents, or birthdays, or the Chuck E. Cheese international conglomerate in general, let me assure you that you're being silly, just silly.

First, you can't argue against birthdays, because that's ridiculous. Second, I actually had a fine time at this birthday party, mostly because it entertained my own son, which is something I can apparently no longer do myself ("No Daddy, can you go in the other room?" he now asks up to sixty times a day), and because, and I don't want to gloat here, but I played the single best game of Ms. Pac-Man I ever played in my life.

Now when I was a very small Ms. Pac-Man player, I considered myself lucky to get to the first movie-scene board, where, as the game tells you hopefully, They Meet ("they," of course, being Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man, in case you were worried that Ms. Pac-Man was out hooking up with Q-Bert or something).

This weekend, if I may be so bold, I rocked Ms. Pac-Man's face off. I cleared boards with an awe-inspiring majesty, got to boards I've never seen before, including one with a banana on it. A banana!

If I was 8 years old, I would be more or less feeling like George Clooney right now; as it is I'm feeling more like the 32-year-old that wouldn't let the other children play Ms. Pac-Man and effectively ruined their birthday party. (And no, I didn't even know they still had Ms. Pac-Man at arcades either; it was tucked away in the corner, lonely and abandoned, like Hillary Clinton).

OK, second Thing (boy, that first one was a long Thing): I have nothing against the Chuck E. Cheese international empire, video arcades, skeeball, Mr. Cheese himself or Munch's Make Believe Band. The band is an aging but not ineffective animatronic house group that puts on something like 70 shows a day and sounds not entirely displeasing. I found their version of "Takin' Care of Business" to be a little lacking in the rock department (I was much more impressed with their performance of Slayer's "Reign in Blood" in its entirety).

I understand perfectly well that children enjoy things that I do not, and some of those things may include running around a large pizza-smelling arcade room in a mad, near-apoplectic pursuit of tokens, tickets and time in front of the skeeball machine. I would just like Mr. Cheese to know that though I'm not telling him how to run his business, it might not hurt to install, somewhere hidden but discoverable, a running fountain of whiskey.

I don't know if you've ever been inside a Chuck E. Cheese on a weekend afternoon, but it looks a little bit like what I imagine life to be like if you are an atom; things and items and small people bounding about with no evident direction or goal, but crazed and violent and fierce and all carrying juice (I don't know if atoms actually transport juice around; I missed that day in Advanced Chem).

They move simply to move; exist for the sake of existing, stopping only when it becomes apparent to one or more of them that I'm walking DIRECTLY BEHIND THEM and they must slam on the brakes to ensure that I have to instantly readjust, which, at my age, is the sort of thing that can pretty quickly result in the fundamental destruction of a knee.

So they take these kids, and they cram them into a finite space filled with whelping buzzes and screaming and video games about guns and dinosaurs and Go-Karts, activate the robot gorilla who sings "Hit Me With Your Best Shot," subscribe to some sort of anti-liquor laws for some reason and then - THEN - they corral the kids together and bestow upon them CAKE, which is made out of SUGAR, which makes children SHOOT FLAMES OUT OF THEIR EARS while they abandon whatever wafer-thin interest they ever had in your paternal authority.

Anyway, there's no point to all this, really, other than my therapist tells me organizing my thoughts and writing them down helps me deal with stress.

But I have to say that the experience overwhelmed and partially shattered me, and I'm not sure I can set foot back in a Chuck E. Cheese again, at least until we have my son's party there next year.

Jeff Vrabel is a freelance writer who will beat you at skeeball. He can be reached at www.jeffvrabel.com.

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